Introduction to The Root of the Matter.
[00:00:00] Hello, everybody. I'm Dr. Rachel Carver, a Board Certified Naturopathic and Biologic dentist. Welcome to my podcast, the “Root of the Matter”, where we will discuss how oral issues are connected to systemic health. I wanted to start the podcast by introducing myself and telling you all a little bit about my story and why I felt so compelled to start a podcast and share all the information I've learned over the last dozen years.
[00:00:30] So my journey into this biologic world started 12 years ago when my second daughter was born. At that time, I had a two-year-old and a two-year-old general dentist practice, and I took about four weeks off and then jumped right back into work, and a month or two later, I developed eczema. All over my hands, and you can imagine as a dentist who washes her hands dozens of times a day, taking gloves on and off constantly, it was very [00:01:00] painful and, and became a real big problem for my everyday life.
[00:01:03] Very uncomfortable. Couldn't bathe my children. Couldn't really hold their hands. It just became very, very uncomfortable. So of course, I went to my dermatologist and they did some patch testing, looking for allergies and put me on steroid creams and I'd use it and it'd work okay for a little while.
[00:01:20] Then I'd get prescribed another one. By the time I had been prescribed the third drug, which was a cancer altering drug, basically stopped the immune system from reacting. It was my timeout moment and I thought, wait a minute, my body is trying to tell me something. I just have to figure out what it was.
[00:01:41] And so that was the moment my entire life changed, where I discovered my purpose, which was to really learn and share everything that I was learning to help improve the lives of others. And so, I just started to read, and one of the first books I read was called [00:02:00] “Eat Dirt” by Dr. Josh Ax, who has a wonderful website, lots of great information about how to naturally recover from certain things about how to understand the root causes of things like high cholesterol, high blood pressure, which are not at all what you would typically think is the cause.
[00:02:18] So, I again started reading and the very first thing I did was take wheat out of my diet. So again, this is 12 years ago. The whole idea of leaky gut was just coming out in the media. And so, I, I stopped eating wheat for four weeks and my hands cleared 90%. This with no drugs, no other intervention other than changing my diet.
[00:02:39] So that was another light bulb moment for me thinking, okay, my body is reacting to this wheat. It's, there's inflammation from this. So, I just started to read more and to dive in a little bit deeper, trying to understand, why am I developing these sensitivities?
[00:02:54] And over the years as I learned more, I learned more about different kind of testing to [00:03:00] do food allergy testing learning how to determine if the degree of leaky gut I had. I ended up going to the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, which was a year-long program, and I became a certified health coach.
[00:03:11] So I learned a ton of information really, about how nutrition, you think those of us who are our doctors and dentists, that we should get a lot of education about nutrition, but we really get none whatsoever. So, a lot of us are, just flailing. And unfortunately, the way medicine and dentistry is set up now, it's very transactional based.
[00:03:31] You come in, you have a symptom, we give you the drug to treat it, or you come in, you have a broken tooth, we fix the tooth, but nobody's really talking about, well why am I having that high blood pressure? Or why did that tooth fracture? And I was, I've always been a very curious person and that why has always bothered me.
[00:03:49] it's always propelled me to keep learning more and doing more, being the best dentist that I can be. So throughout some of that learning, I learned a lot about digestive [00:04:00] enzymes, about probiotics, B vitamins, how important those are. Learned a little bit about genetics and we know even just 12 years ago, we talked all about genetics.
[00:04:09] If you had these genes, well, you're destined to have breast cancer, or you're destined to have this disease or that, and we know that's really not the case anymore. With the study of epigenetics, we understand that your environment plays a much, much bigger role. In the manifestation of disease.
[00:04:25] So for instance, a woman who may have the BRCA gene like myself only has a 5% chance of getting that cancer. That it's more the lifestyle factors that are gonna be a bigger proponent. A bigger determinant of whether I would develop breast cancer or not. So, we need to, not be so worried about exactly what our genes are.
[00:04:47] It's really the environment that's gonna turn that gene on or off. So again, always trying to think about what is that, what is that root cause? I learned more about the nervous system, how absolutely important it is. To [00:05:00] balance the nervous system. We are often in modern society today, we're always in that fight or flight or sympathetic, overdrive nervous system.
[00:05:09] That system biologically was designed to help us run away from the sabretooth tiger, when we were in immediate danger, but it was supposed to shut off immediately. So ideally, we should be spending 80% of our time in the parasympathetic nervous system, which is the rest, digest, repair. This is when we go to sleep.
[00:05:28] This is the nervous system we're, should be in. However, those sabretooth tigers in modern society are, the phone calls, the constant tech messages. The kids wanting this, the employees wanting this, your boss wanting this, the person cutting you off in traffic. We are just constantly
[00:05:44] in this state of sympathetic overdrive. And when we are in that nervous system, we cannot digest our food. So even if you ate the healthiest salad, if you are in that state, your digestive juices are shut down. You are not going to [00:06:00] digest and extract all those nutrients from that very healthy meal.
[00:06:05] So again, it's not just about what we're eating, but how we're eating. And if we're eating in the car, we're eating while we're on the computer, while we're, we're distracted in some other way, we are not going to extract all of those nutrients from that food. So another really important thing I learned, and as I was going through this process over the years, my eczema would get a little bit better, but it would never go away a hundred percent.
[00:06:30] And I think part of that was for me was cuz I wasn't done learning. There was still more that I had to, had to learn before I could really share my message and help others. So, when I started to learn about energy medicine, this really took my healing to the next level, really understanding how our thoughts play a major, major role in our overall health.
[00:06:50] So, even if you are eating again, you could be eating and exercising and doing everything right, but maybe you still feel exhausted. You're still [00:07:00] angry. So if you are thinking, I'm just never gonna get better, this is hopeless. Well, that's what you are telling your cells.
[00:07:08] And so the cells are hearing that. I mean, and it sounds kind of woo-hoo and new age but there's tons of studies. There's so much scientific evidence out there showing how majorly impactful our thoughts are. and our overall, physiology And so we often, in medicine and dentistry, we're learning about the physiology.
[00:07:28] How our receptors grab onto the vitamins and take them into the cell and how that creates energy. But without the underlying, proper energy fields, none of those reactions can happen. So, it's absolutely vital that we have. Inherent energy, life force energy, if you wanna call it that in order to heal.
[00:07:49] So we could be taking all the supplements and eating all the right foods, but if we're exhausted all the time and we feel like we're in a hopeless dead-end job or a [00:08:00] difficult relationship, or whatever it may be. We can only get so far. So, when we're healing and throughout the podcast we'll talk about different ways that we can, try meditation or try things like Qigong and moving energy, even just simple thought processes.
[00:08:17] We've all heard about how important gratitude is. So all of these things have a really major impact not just on our over health, but our oral health. . And really, really important. These that, that stress is such, so pervasive in today's world today. So if we can all learn ways to mitigate that, well, we're all gonna be so much healthier.
[00:08:35] And so as I was learning more about the health, I started to think about dentistry and started to think, wow, there are so many toxins in our world today. Especially in dentistry, when we think about all the products we use, all the oral care products that we use I started to think, is there a better way?
[00:08:50] Can I be doing dentistry differently? And that just took me on this whole path of biologic and holistic dentistry. And really, again, trying to understand like in functional medicine [00:09:00] and foundational medicine, The why, why do we develop cavities? Why are we getting, gum disease, not just because my mother and brother and everybody has gum disease that I'm destined to have gum disease too.
[00:09:13] you may have a genetic susceptibility, which may predispose you to these things, but if you can change that environment right, and you can make sure you're having the right nutrients, then we don't have to have those same, diseases that may have plagued our relatives. I start to learn about more about airway issues.
[00:09:31] My older daughter sucked her thumb until she was eight years old and, I, as a dentist, I was looking at the way her face was develop. Seemed okay. But once her permanent teeth came in, they all came in crooked. And my younger daughter, she would always wake up in the middle of the night and I didn't really think anything of it.
[00:09:48] I liked it. I thought it was cute. She'd come in my bed, rub my back. I didn't think anything of it until I took a sleep apnea course. It was based for adults. But talking about waking up in the middle of the night and sure enough, [00:10:00] when I found the right dentist Dr. Ballinger, who's right in our area locally, and she did some x-rays and sure enough, super small airway.
[00:10:09] So she, her brain was waking her up because she wasn't getting enough oxygen. And we see this a lot with kids who are, bedwetting. That may be normal when they're one two, but once a child is beyond four or five, six years of age, they should not be wetting the bed anymore. That is a sign of a congested airway.
[00:10:26] Large tonsils, again, another sign that the airway, there's a problem. They may be mouth breathing, and when we mouth breathe, we end up spending more time in that sympathetic nervous system, which I already said was so bad for us. So if you're a child and you're in that sympathetic state all the time, you may not be growing right?
[00:10:45] You may be very, very small. You're not activating your growth hormone properly. So, it's really important and we can screen for the, once we know, we can screen for these things in children as young as one, two years old. And there's so many amazing interventions. We don't have to [00:11:00] wait till the kid is 12 years old before we do braces or something like that.
[00:11:03] There's a lot of great things that we can do. And part of the reason I wanna do this podcast is to educate, not just, patients. But also, other doctors, again, we don't get any of this information on dental school or medical school. So, the more that we're talking about these things, the more that we share this information, the more that we're asking our doctors and dentists, the more that we're gonna create awareness and really change the way dentistry medicine be done so that we can get back to wellness instead of disease management.
[00:11:32] We can actually get to a state, state of wellness. So through these, these dozen of years, you know what finally got my eczema gone once and for all was treating parasites so, so bizarre. We tend to think of parasites as only being, in third world countries. We have to think about where do we get most of our produce in this country, right?
[00:11:54] And, think about how fast COVID spread. Things are everywhere. And parasites are very, very [00:12:00] common in children. It's interesting that we kind of deworm our pets, a couple times a year, but we don't ever think about doing it ourselves. So if you have a pet, you're bound to have parasites as well.
[00:12:10] When I discovered this company, CellCore I heard Dr. Jay Davidson speak and he just really resonated with me two months on their products and my eczema was gone. So, it wasn't anything I was touching wasn't that I was allergic to something, but the parasites and in my career where I'm breathing and I'm around heavy metals all the time.
[00:12:31] These parasites were actually protecting me from the dangers of these heavy metals. So very interesting that, that parasites are something that I struggle with and have to be careful with. But two months on their products and my, my hands were clear for the first time and stayed away, which was absolutely amazing to me.
[00:12:50] So these parasites, which were clogging up my liver and bile ducts, which was then leading to hormonal symptoms, it was leading to thyroid issue. [00:13:00] That's a really big thing that we'll hopefully talk about in this podcast too. So many people are diagnosed with thyroid issues and, and it may, may be part of the thyroid, but a lot of it is actually liver issues.
[00:13:10] It can be, we're not making enough of a good gut bacterium, so we're not converting that T4 that comes from the thyroid into the active form of T3. So our thyroid may be fine. We may have great levels of T4, but we're not converting, so that can be a liver issue. So many of our problems, diabetes, that's another liver issue.
[00:13:28] So many of us in the world today have fatty liver, even children, because of, again, there are so many toxins in our world today. And if your liver isn't functioning well, your blood isn't getting filtered your hormones aren't getting properly processed, you're building up toxins. It's a real problem.
[00:13:43] And all of that backup, right? Because my liver, bile and bowels weren't working properly, things were backing up into my skin. And when we don't have proper functioning elimination organs, that's what happens. We get back up in our lungs and back up into our skin. I, I swear, every other [00:14:00] commercial on TV today is about a new medication for some kind of rash.
[00:14:04] And again, that's the overloading of our livers that's creating rashes in everybody. That's not normal. It's a backup. So, we're gonna talk a lot about detoxification, but more importantly, drainage. You cannot detoxify yourself from all these toxins. if those organ elimination aren't working properly.
[00:14:22] And what I've really come to believe, and cell cores really helped me understand even more is I'm really not that interested in what your diagnosis is per se. And that's not to minimize, any diagnosis that you get, but really at the core of what are problems, it comes down to toxins and infections. And all, any disease that you may have is a result of these toxins and infections.
[00:14:47] And because we have different genetics and we have different lifestyles, we may manifest the symptoms of these toxins and infections as different diseases, but it all comes down to an imbalance in the body. The immune system [00:15:00] is out of balance. The nervous system is out balance. The gut is out of balance.
[00:15:03] We need to recreate balance and we need to stop always thinking. Killing the bad. And instead, how do we nurture the right environment so that disease can't happen in the first place? Right? And so when we have a lot of this toxicity, a lot of the problems and diseases we have too are because of deficiency.
[00:15:21] So toxicity will cause deficiency. We don't have enough with the right enzymes, with enough vitamins. Then we're gonna have symptoms, right where we're tired all the time, or we're constipated. We don't have enough magnesium, we don't have enough B vitamin. So, we need to help clear out those toxins and infections and then restore those nutrient levels and balance our nervous system again.
[00:15:44] So, I've been, really fortunate to have an amazing group of patients who keep inspiring me to learn more and to do better, and, to bring them the, the great treatments that we have. My own hygienist has been an inspiration to me. Introducing her to the idea of [00:16:00] parasites. She was able to completely reverse her autoimmunity that she struggled with for, two plus decades.
[00:16:07] Her doctor, when she went to have the testing. Wouldn't, didn't even wanna do the testing for her cuz he said he had never in his 40-year career ever seen autoimmune numbers change. Once they were there, it's too late, and so he was floored. When all of her numbers were completely normal. And again, because what she did was she went after the root, she got removed all the parasites out of her system.
[00:16:29] So her thyroid normalized her vitamin D levels. Okay? So if you struggle with getting your vitamin D levels higher, it's not about taking more vitamin D, but it's get getting rid of the infections that are preventing that vitamin D from attaching to the right receptor. So really, really important, and I've been so inspired to share my knowledge with all of you because I really want to empower each and one of you to become your own doctor, to create awareness and start asking those questions.
[00:16:59] [00:17:00] And the more we all start asking questions, the more we start communicating. Then we're gonna start moving the needle. We're gonna start changing the way we all become educated and the way that we, we treat others and really get back to the idea of wellness. So please join me subscribe to my new podcast, The Root of the Matter.
[00:17:19] Where I'll be interviewing tons of experts in their fields. And how common oral issues are can impact overall health and how we can take those next steps to regain and optimize our own health. We'll learn about things like the truth about fluoride the actual root causes of cavities and gum disease, potential health hazards from root canals, potential problems from old extraction sites.
[00:17:47] We're gonna learn about nutrition. And the importance of proper nutrition, balancing nutrition. We'll learn about how our emotions are really impacting our overall health and steps to, help us [00:18:00] learn how to balance those nervous systems. So please join me on this journey and I look forward to sharing much more with you.
[00:18:08] Goodbye for now.